In a cheap attempt to discredit special envoy Elliott Abrams, a long-time foreign-policy practitioner who served in the Reagan administration, Omar began reading from a set of tendentious questions apparently cribbed from an equally tendentious article that appeared on Al Jazeera’s Web site:

Omar: “On Feb. 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about US policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda reports about the massacre in El Mozote [sic, Abrams did not deny it in his testimony, the discrepancy in the immediate, confusing aftermath was the number of victims] in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by US-trained troops. “During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping 12-year-old girls before they killed them . . . You later said that the US policy in El Salvador was a fabulous achievement. Yes or no, do you still think so?”

Abrams: “From the day that President [José Napoleón] Duarte was elected in a free election to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.”
Omar: “Yes or no, do you think that massacre was a fabulous achievement that happened under our watch?”

Abrams: “That is a ridiculous question, and I will not respond to it.”

Omar: “Yes or no?”

Abrams: “No — ”

Omar: “I will take that as a yes.”

Abrams: “I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack.”

It is said that those on the left never forget, and that is never more true when it comes to the United States and Latin America. To them, the sum total of US relations with our southern neighbors amounts to a caricature of unwarranted interference, coup d’etats and economic exploitation. And special scorn is held out for the Reagan era.

At the time, with Soviet support, Cuba was helping to organize at least 27 different guerrilla groups in the Western Hemisphere, totaling about 25,000 armed and trained members by 1987. Moreover, the US estimated that a minimum of 20,000 individuals, including more than 10,000 Latin Americans, had been trained in one of the more than 50 guerrilla courses offered in Cuban military facilities.

Their goal was nothing less than producing Ché Guevara’s “two, three, many Vietnams” in Latin America.

At the same time, nearly every country in Latin America was ruled by a military junta, which largely waged violent counter-insurgency campaigns against the Marxist insurgents, especially in Central America.

It was into this maelstrom that the Reagan administration stepped. But even as the Reagan folks sought to train and arm militaries, they had a concurrent political-diplomatic strategy of fostering democratic institutions. It was time for the generals to go, Abrams has said.

This is precisely what happened in El Salvador in 1984, when millions of Salvadorans defied guerrilla threats to go to the polls to elect Christian Democrat Duarte over a right-wing candidate, and in 1986 in Guatemala with the election of another Christian Democrat, Vinicio Cerezo. In neighboring Honduras in 1982, Roberto Suazo won over a military-backed candidate, replacing yet another general.

No, it wasn’t always pretty; guerrilla wars rarely are. In fact, they have a habit of being brutal and unforgiving, because that’s the way guerrillas want it — purposefully hiding behind innocent civilians seeking to provoke the kinds of atrocities that occurred at El Mozote to exploit them for propaganda value, domestically and internationally.

They failed in Central America largely because of US policies of bolstering security while pushing elections, enabling democracy.

Today, in all Latin America, democracy and free elections have become the norm. In an irony that obviously escapes Omar, the only holdouts are left-wing authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, where human rights are being systematically violated.

Elliott Abrams’ record stands on its own. His only transgression is never having genuflected at the altar of the radical left, especially on Latin America. And the choicest irony of all is that the scorn they try to heap on him is not due to his failures, but his successes.

José Cárdenas served in the George W. Bush administration, focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean.